


Underneath

by tuesday



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Ambiguity, Bad Ending, Enemies, Fens Street Sewer, Horror, M/M, Murder, Serial Killers, Torture, Trick or Treat: Challenge Yourself, Trick or Treat: Trick, feral ghouls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-09 05:42:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16443962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuesday/pseuds/tuesday
Summary: "Detectiiiive," the Phantom croons like the freak he is. "Don't you appreciate my latest work? I did it all for you."





	Underneath

**Author's Note:**

  * For [psychomachia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/psychomachia/gifts).



It's cold. It's damp. Drake scraped open his palm lifting the manhole cover, and he thinks he sprained something when he slipped off the last rung of the ladder down. He still has his gun, and the holotapes and dead bodies say he's fresh on the trail, but—

He feels off. There's something wrong. He feels it deep in his gut, that there's something worse coming than the reveal that the sicko he's been chasing has been hiding under the streets he's sworn to protect and that said sicko likely already knows that he's there.

Step after unsteady step, Drake walks into the Phantom's lair.

 

"Detectiiiive," the Phantom croons like the freak he is. "Don't you appreciate my latest work? I did it all for you."

Drake's limping. He lost his gun in a little river of fresh sewage and old water, and there's no time to reclaim it even if he'd seen where it landed. The length of pipe he's fashioned into a makeshift weapon slides in his bloody grip. This is not the time to antagonize someone who's killed at least twenty people, probably more.

"Your art sucks." No one's ever claimed Drake has a good sense of timing. "It's almost as ugly as your face."

"Really, now. Is that the worst you can do? I've heard crueler taunts on the playground. Be honest with me: you like it, don't you?"

Honesty? Drake can do honesty.

It's a shame he lives to regret it, but Drake's been living with the consequences of his words and actions since he was eight years old. Little Timmy, twice the size of any other kid on Drake's block, hadn't appreciated Drake's honesty, either. Drake thinks his crooked nose is kind of handsome, that it gives him character.

The scalpel in his friendly neighborhood serial killer's hands says he's got a lot of character left to give.

 

He doesn't live too long, though. He thinks it's something the Phantom gave him, at first, then that's it's an earthquake, never mind they're in Boston and his childhood Californian fears are an entire length of the country away. The shaking continues, gets worse.

The Phantom—and even here, now, strapped to a gurney while the entire world explodes, Drake refuses to name him, to humanize him, to admit that he—to admit that—

 _The Phantom_ loses his balance, loses the edge of the scalpel deep in the meat of his own neck.

Drake doesn't live too long, except that he does, strapped to this gurney while Boston shakes itself apart and a man with his lover's face bleeds to death on the sewer floor. He feels off, and it's not just the drugs, not just the knowledge churning in his gut that everyone he knows and loves either is or soon will be dead. He can feel the flesh sloughing from his face, can feel the skin peeling from his neck.

There's something wrong. _There's something wrong._

 

(Two hundred years later, give or take a decade or two, someone comes along. They open up the sewer and don't immediately turn back at the sight and sound of all those ferals roaming free. They find some bodies and make some more. They loot some exhibits that were once touted and rejected as art. They pick up four holotapes and take a look around. There's a makeshift operating room, complete with rusty surgical tools and a gurney with all its straps worn through and hanging open and loose.

It's been two hundred years. They've never been here before. They don't know there's something wrong. They don't have the necessary references to realize there are empty spaces where two more bodies should be.)


End file.
